In Bruno Baratti ceramic painter, anthology 1935-1980, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Ducale, Pesaro, 18 July – 20 September 1981
Dear Bruno,
I have arrived late to see you and the friends.
Being here on my own has perhaps helped me to experience your glazed terracotta statue intensely. I am sorry that I could not speak to you and tell you that your statue is set on this hill without excitement and concern. It shares in the idea of believing that outside it there is the singularity of a place: the symbol is toned done in the return to the thing and the thing marks the drama of a border. I have seen again that beautiful oak with some already autumnal colours, the road from Candelara to Ginestreto with the scattered Ebla tablets, the road for the gaze, the ear of marble of the sculptor friend who is waiting.
Although it was midday, the gesture of your Indra was illuminated by a modulated light, a gesture proffered like a prophecy that indicates the river below. It led me across the clods still fresh from the plough down to the river. I saw the bend where you used to go with the cart to fetch clay – you told me that you always went at dawn because you liked the shadowless light.
That singular hour, the feeling of going and returning, the objects of mud and sound, the hollow with the meanders full of silence are your images.I always stop on the quay of Soria, I stop especially to look at the water of the river as it meets that of the sea: the dull ochre water. The similarity of the fishermen’s huts, although more colourful, with those of the woodcutters, makes me think that this place (home?) is the centre of a tranquil labyrinth: as our friend the philosopher says, a place that summons. It is not my imagination that makes me see your masks (masked persons) go in and out of those huts.
The mask, that with the yellow beak, holds a conversation on the perspective of Alberti, with fishes, birds, dolls (of flesh, wood, cork, paper?).
Like you, Sandro, Tullio, Giancarlo and other friends too have looked for an order, a distance to establish whether this place belongs to a region or a border. At any rate, it is a landscape where certainly no hero has stopped, where the stories of Derceto are not told around the tables of the inns, but where a hill, descending to the sea, reveals the tuff rocks: they are the bones that Deucalion scatters on the ground.
I still have that dark mother-of-pearl button that your mask gave me – the one with the garment and the big blue hat – when I left Pesaro. The colours of that mother-of-pearl are the same as those used by the ceramicists of Umbria. Brought from the Orient like the thousand and one nights, they are the colours (Newton too became a wise man again when he wrote about them) of the layers of veils.
They are the same that can express those phenomena of light that are formed at dusk with the haze of the Umbrian valleys. This is the consonance that gives the same content, the same conjugation, to the meanders of the Metauro and Foglia, to the rhythms of the hills, to the forms and material of vases and pitchers. It makes the poet say: ‘Therefore may for me the memory preserve / the distracted river / even among stones and meanders / or in the tepid bed of the shallows’. And the philosopher: ‘The principle of the handle: to be the medium of the work of art with the world, a medium that is yet perfectly included in the work of art […]. With the handle the world reaches the vessel, with the spout the vessel reaches the world’. The friend: to seek a line that expresses a parabola with the geometry of the liquid. For you, with the complicity of alchemy, to prise out the ancient jewel hidden in the stone, on the glaze (that made with tin, sediment and sand). The long periphery walls, the echoes of the worries, marvels, projects of a by now distant vanguard (only Chagall’s violin and a gaze that banishes fear are near), a system of by now exposed simulacra, a codex that accelerates and dilates make me believe that what I have with you is more than friendship and gratitude. It is a relation between man and nature, man and the surroundings, that is contiguity for us.
And it is this that makes me see on the horizon (the abode of myth) the ritual of your Viæ crucis and on the beach the presence of your shells. Which makes me recognise around the fountain (as in the metope of Orpheus) the rhythms of your flowers, the flight of your birds. This contiguity makes me decipher the words of the mask with the yellow beak.
It is from the hill, the one above Santa Veneranda, that one can descry the triangulation with the horizon of the sea. Within the triangle, with the sides as tangent, has been traced the ring of the walls of Pesaro, with their four gates. Inside, on those walls, is your place. The centre immersed in the fountain distances your work from seduction and its stable contour belongs to poetry only as a risk: you are not allowed a stroll above the walls.
It is useless to tell you that a clod of earth can contain the secret of the oracle, that a furrow in the field may contain all possible words, that in the water of the river beneath the bridge is the navel of the moon that listens to the earth, that the clay still contains hidden alphabets. You continue, within that ring, to populate the walls with landscapes, skies, animals, seesaws: with objects projected through a transparent world. I stop where the quay of Soria is painted, with the chorus of masks around the fountain. From that chorus an invitation not to take off the mask with the yellow beak, because it does not cover the face of De Chirico’s mannequin, nor to raise the curtain with the house on the hill to find Magritte’s Les Promenades d’Euclide.
The gull flies beyond the dull ochre water, my friend interrupts the dialogue with the geometry of the air, but the sharp bend is obliged to question constantly the axis that reaches the centre of the earth where the egg of the origin lies.